Matrix Games Forums

Tony,

I reviewed your PDF architectural proposal on Harpgamer.com earlier today. I was exchanging email with Herman today and he said that I should just post my comments directly to you. Too lazy to register there at the moment (doing 5 things at once). So, I will reprint my comments here; maybe register there later. Busy working on making an "Interpreting the TMA dot stack tutorial for SC/DW" at the moment.

Herman,
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PS1: I downloaded Tony's spec from Harpgamer of a distributed platform independent architecture for Harpoon. Very interesting and ambitious! Not much real value for the PC gamer there, but I could see it being of great value for the military running massive parallel exercises with much more complex modules for sensors and weapons than what the commercial game offers. Also, aside from being simply scalable to take advantage of distributed performance gains, I imagine such an architecture would allow ships deployed at sea to conduct virtual training exercises. Additionally, the architecture would allow for joint simulated and physical exercises, since the modular system could eliminate the distinctions between physical units and simulated units.

PS2: Not sure if you follow what I am talking about, since I don't know what your profession is. For me, it is systems. You may pass along the my architecture comments to Tony if you care to.

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Hehe, thanks, you're the first person to much comment. 
 
The distributed nature could be a huge boon to a military implementation but I have no plan to follow any of the established military communications protocol standards so it'd be useless from that point of view.  My intent is more to open the game as much as possible to third parties, knowing that we aren't allowed to share the source code of the game itself.  So one way is to break the game into components and publish the interface standards we dream up, hoping that there are some interested coders out there to make different sensor models and whatnot.
 
Not a part of that document but along similar lines is the export dll interface.  I haven't posted up the sample code yet but some of the description is at: http://www.advancedgaming.biz/wiki/main/index.php?title=HCCE:Extend:Export_DLL
 
The original thread MarkShot is talking about can be seen at: http://harpgamer.com/harpforum/index.php?showtopic=2272
 
Always open to comments but they'll likely get lost here, if you can reply at HarpGamer that would be greatly appreciated!

If you are interested in military applications, what they (we in my other hat) want most badly is not the ability to distribute to lots of players (too expensive to run) but to distribute to maybe 8 per side, with "planning tools" so that those players can schedule a queue of events to occur (some conditional) out over time. Sort of "rolling scenario AI editor" with separate "plans" for Air (the Air Tasking Order), surface (the Maritime Tasking Plan) and surface (the Waterspace management plan) .

The ability to pass XML data outside the game of everything that happens is also needed.
The general idea you have has value, but not sure of its marketability. If you are doing it for fun - great, but I wouldn't mortgage the house to finance the effort...

Entirely a hobby aka time sink on the HC side of things.